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Simon Starling, Le Jardin Suspendu, 1998. Courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute, Glasgow.

a 1:6.5 scale model of a 1920’s ‘Farman Mosquito’, built using
the wood from a balsa tree cut on the 13th May at Rodeo Grande,
Baba, Ecuador, to fly in the grounds of Heide II designed in 1965
by David McGlashan and Neil Everist. (Moma at Heide, Melbourne,
1998, The Modern Institute, Glasgow).

Modernist art is meant to be difficult. It was intended to
shock, to stir up passions and outrage bourgeois values. It
achieved much of that ambition, but where could it go? The audience
became dulled to shock tactics and, ultimately, even the most
conservative of institutions valued the frisson of
transgression that 'modern art' could provide.

For artists, the past thirty years has allowed a gradual
reassessment of the impact and purpose of modernist ideology. Much
work has been a critical evaluation of its successes and failures,
postmodernism being in most cases a response to, rather than a
break with, modernism itself. Coming late to the field of modernist
critique, the work of Simon Starling occupies a fascinating
position. Perhaps sitting on the cusp of a redefinition of value
systems, it looks back with sympathy and knowledge at the work of
the early twentieth century, while allowing the audience sight of
its failure. His contribution is also peculiarly reflective of
modernism's history in Britain, or perhaps more accurately,
England.

In England, the exception in Europe, modernism was not the
defining cultural moment of the twentieth century. Instead it
remained for much of the period a type of optional extra,
occasionally applied to foreign-designed architecture or to art
from the rural idyll of St Ives, but never securely anchored in the
metropolitan heart. It is certainly not without reason that artists
such as John Piper and Paul Nash sought to define the particular
qualities of English art in relation to historical models of
Anglo-Saxon culture or its relationship to landscape and
countryside. They wanted to maintain a sense of continuity that
separated English history from the rest of Europe

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